I decided I wanted to put my books up on All Romance Ebooks. So I downloaded calibre so I could convert to as many formats as possible. It looked like everything was going great, but when I opened up the epub file, all my apostrophes were black rectangles. Not to mention, the first page was my cover and it was all stretched out (that might just be a viewing problem…will have to look into it further). The mobi format did the same thing with my apostrophes and it lost my page breaks. The pdb format changed my double quotes to rectangles and my apostrophes to question marks. All the formats lost my chapter heading centering. Ditto with the RB format.
This is one more reason why it’s so hard and frustrating to have a full time job and try to write. I tried to do all of this during my lunch hour, and that’s just not enough time to figure out all the problems. At this point, I’m almost tempted to forget about All Romance. But, on the other hand, an author should try to get her/his books in as many venues as possible. I thought calibre was the answer to book formatting. The easiest route would be to download the different formats of my books from Smashwords. But that’s against their terms of service, and I don’t blame them for that. They spent lots of money to get our books in all those formats. And my conscience won’t let me violate those terms that I agreed to.
So I have seven books to try to convert to several different formats, and I just don’t know when I’ll have time to do it. Not to mention, where will I find time to figure out why they aren’t converting properly? I don’t usually let things get to me. I’m a very laid back, calm person who rolls with the punches. But I feel like I’ve been punched too hard this time.
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